Greg Sazima

Greg Sazima's initial exposure and interest in mindfulness began in the mid 1990s, while working to incorporate Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) tactics into chronic disease management programming at the amily Medicine Residency Clinic. His personal passion for the benefits of an individual meditation practice followed. He has studied and practiced vipassana (insight) meditation with a teacher and training group in the Tibetan Kagyu lineage for almost twenty years. Over time, he has gradually integrated awareness practices into his clinical and teaching work.

His writing career began with medical lectures and journal articles. Academic publications and presentations include works on doctor/"difficult" patient relationships and incorporation of meditation training into outpatient clinical practices. More recently he has written for mass media, with opinion essays on mental health issues published in the Sacramento Bee and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Dr. Sazima is currently in sustained remission after a riveting decade of recurring medical crises due to chrondrosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, located in his cervical spine. In many ways, Practical Mindfulness, conceived out of his crucible of suffering and uncertainty, was a parallel process to keeping his personal and professional life on track in the midst of chaos. His "pay it forward" mission in Practical Mindfulness is to help others gain a practical understanding and basic mastery of the built-in, human privilege of mindful awareness, so that meditation becomes a potent, sustained act of self-care.

Dr. Sazima's wife of thirty years is a family physician. They have three adult sons. Besides his volunteer work at Capital Public Radio, he serves on the Board of Directors of Snowline Hospice, a non-profit palliative care provider in the Sierra foothills and Sacramento.